Why You Won't Find the Meaning of Life

The "meaning of life" business is booming despite the recession. After eviscerating Jim Holt's new meaning-of-life tome in an Asia Times Online review, I felt sufficiently saturated with antibodies to watch Terrence Malick's Oscar-nominated existential epic Tree of Life on pay-per-view. Giggles overcame me after about half an hour.

As G.K. Chesterton said (actually, he didn't quite, but should have), if you stop believing in God, you'll believe in anything. For all their self-righteous scientism, atheists turn into the soupiest spiritualists when it comes to problems like birth and death. Malick's silly flick wants to project the problems of a 1950s Texas family onto a cosmological backdrop, with images of the birth of the universe, or whatever. It so pretentiously idiotic that I wrote off the $4.99 I had paid to Time-Warner cable in short order.

Woody Allen had it down pat in Antz. An ant on a couch tells an ant psychiatrist, "I feel so insignificant!," to which the ant psychiatrist replies, "That's a breakthrough. You are insignificant." I'm not out to proselytize, but the choice is digital: either the Maker of Heaven loves you, which makes you significant, or the idea of a Creator God is as of the same ilk as Richard Dawkins's Flying Spaghetti Monster, in which case you are insignificant. In the latter case, get over it.